NHL: Boston Bruins shopping for deadline deals

Sunday

Mar 31, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Bud Barth NHL

Now that Michael Ryder, Jarome Iginla and Martin St. Louis are off the board, the pressure is mounting on general manager Peter Chiarelli to come up with the player(s) who can help the Bruins close the seemingly widening chasm between themselves and the Pittsburgh Penguins.

The NHL trade deadline is 3 p.m. Wednesday, and until then there are going to be frazzled nerves on the part of several Bruins who could be fodder for deals. But that’s the way it is every year at this time for all contending teams.

The problem is that the Bruins have other issues besides worrying about trades. They have lost five of their last seven, including a 3-1 defeat to the Flyers on Saturday. They are 7-6-2 in their last 15 games after that remarkable 14-2-2 start.

Worse, they have lost six games that they led to start the third period, a situation in which they were 32-0-0 last season and 30-2-2 the season before. They have become poor front-runners, which is not a good sign for a team with designs on a Stanley Cup.

One or two new players probably won’t change that, but there’s no reason — once they get healthy again, which means the return of defenseman Adam McQuaid and center Chris Kelly — that they can’t become the same team that started 14-2-2. That team punted only two third-period leads in 18 games.

“We have a great team,” insisted defenseman Andrew Ference, whose uneven performances have contributed to Boston’s problems, although he has been better recently. “We’ve had high expectations of ourselves the whole way through and that hasn’t changed.

“We fully believe in our ability to win, and that hasn’t changed.”

Coach Claude Julien said, and his players agree, that they have “turned the page” on the aborted Iginla deal, which basically boiled down to one great player exercising his option to go to what appears to be the NHL’s best team, Pittsburgh. It was a no-brainer.

Defenseman Matt Bartkowski, who was to be part of the compensation package for Iginla, heard the reports during the Montreal game on Wednesday night, but discovered online about 12:30 a.m. that the deal was off. He said he was relieved.

One day earlier, the 24-year-old had signed a one-year, one-way contract extension for $650,000, which means that will be his salary regardless of whether he’s in the NHL or AHL — and that it will count against Boston’s cap even if he’s in Providence.

For that reason, it seemed like a move made in preparation for his trade to Calgary, but Bartkowski said he was assured otherwise by Chiarelli. It seems strange, though, given that the salary cap goes down next season and money will be tighter, that the Bruins would make such a move in anticipation of keeping him. It doesn’t bode well for the future of Ference, whose contract is up after this season, but we’ll see.

Bartkowski, meanwhile, doesn’t feel snubbed by the Bruins’ attempt to trade him. “From what I was told, Calgary wanted me,” he said. “It’s not that Boston was trying to get rid of me. Peter reiterated that to me again (Friday).”

Chiarelli now may be turning his attention to rangy San Jose forward Ryane Clowe or Jaromir Jagr of Dallas. Both are rental possibilities, although the Stars are talking extension with Jagr, which may or may not be significant.

Jagr, a formerly dominant player, is now 41 but still had 14-12-26 totals as of Saturday. Clowe, 30, averaged 20 goals the last four seasons, but is merely 0-11-11 in 27 games. He has missed games with a shoulder injury, and there is speculation that the shoulder is one of the reasons for his dearth of goals.

Both are big players — Jagr 6-foot-3, 240 pounds and Clowe 6-2, 225 — who would fit into Boston’s heavy design. Edmonton’s Ryan Whitney has also been mentioned.

Chiarelli also covets a defenseman, and the names of Mark Streit of the Islanders and Kimmo Timonen of the Flyers have been bandied about.

Ference, whose future in Boston could be impacted by any defensive acquisitions, denied that there’s any real nervousness in the locker room over the uncertainty.

“You’d drive yourself crazy if you got wrapped up in that kind of stuff or started to worry about rumors and speculation,” he said. “I mean, it’s background noise.”

As powerful as the Penguins look right now, the NHL is a league where the best team on paper — or even in the standings — rarely wins it all. Look at last season when the L.A. Kings, as the No. 8 seed in the West, won the Stanley Cup.

In this century, in fact, only three of the 12 Cup champions had the league’s best record during the regular season. And only one other winner was the top seed in its conference.

“It doesn’t matter how much talent you have,” defenseman Dennis Seidenberg said. “As long as you work hard, you should be all set. ... Talent doesn’t win any hockey games. The games have to be played first. Until it happens, it’s all speculation.”

It’ll be interesting when the Bruins, who have lost twice in Pittsburgh this season by a single goal, host the Penguins and their new supercharged lineup on Friday night, April 19.

“I’m still one of those guys that believes we’ve got a real good team here,” Julien said, “and just because we haven’t played our best lately doesn’t make us less of a team. My belief is we’ll get better here and we’ll move on.”

And the Iginla fiasco notwithstanding, Julien believes Chiarelli will land another player who will help.

“One guy’s not going to be a savior,” the coach warned. “No matter who we get, we’re not going to sit back and watch this guy go. We’ve still got to do the job.

“That’s where we have to understand that we’re a good team right now. At one point, I think we were 14-2 with basically the same lineup, so it’s just about finding our game again and getting that confidence that we had earlier on, and it’s going to come back.”